Part 9: Chapter 5 (DLC), Stages 1 & 2

• Killzone: Liberation – Chapter 5, Stages 1 & 2 (with commentary by Blind Sally, nine-gear crow & CJacobs)
  

The supplementary fifth chapter of Killzone: Liberation begins a few days to weeks after the conclusion of Chapter 4. Metrac might be dead, and the Helghast assault of Vekta broken, but pockets of alarmingly well-coordinated resistance are still popping up in Southern Vekta concentrated around Sedah City. Templar and Hakha are being sent in by General Stratson to make contact with ISA General Mandrake, as well as hunt down the apparent traitor Rico Velasquez.

The Chapter 5 DLC can still be downloaded for free from Guerrilla’s website and integrated into any copy of Killzone: Liberation, and I will show you how to do that at the end of this update.

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STAGE 1: THE HUNT

Stage 1 begins all Mad Max on us, with Templar and Hakha driving an ISA Jeep across the Sedah desert towards one of the main outlying ISA bases just outside of the city.



Over the radio, Evelyn informs them him that they’ve lost all communication with the base, indicating it’s been overrun by the Helghast.



Templar responds over the radio and—JESUS CHRIST, that’s not Nigel Whitmey! Yep. Templar has yet ANOTHER new voice actor for the Chapter 5 DLC for… I don’t know. Reasons. I don’t feel comfortable speculating, really. Regardless, our uncredited stand-in Templar is now the third man to voice Jan, chronologically, and the fourth actor overall.

Templar truly is an Everyman Hero; not only can he be multiple people across multiple games, he can also be multiple people in the same game.

Or, as I say in the video, we have simply completed the walking Metal Gear: Solid reference that is this game and we’ve swapped out the base game’s Solid Templar for the DLC’s Liquid Templar.

Everyone else appearing in the DLC retains their original voice actor, although once we make the jump to Killzone 2 on the PlayStation 3, Templar, Rico, and Evelyn all get new voice actors anyway.



The base appears to be deserted…



Yet it’s automated defenses are online… and targeting Templar’s Jeep.



So Jan just decides to drive right up to the main gate. I mean, there’s absolutely nothing that could possible go wrong with tha—



Oh I guess he died then.





RIP Liquid Templar and PTSD Ghost Hakha



But wait! What’s this?! Very clever, Templar. The old “push the Jeep down the hill in Neutral and hope it comes to a stop so it can be blown up” gambit. I’ve used that one before too. _{It didn’t work out quite as well as it did here.}



Ever the optimist, aren’t we Jan?



The Helghast realize they done goofed and prepare to raise the barricades.



But Action Jan dive rolls over them before they close. Oh why hello there Killzone 3 gameplay mechanics, fancy meeting you here.

Also, I don’t think the mad dash to get through the gate was all that necessary. That’s an anti-vehicle gate, not an anti-personnel one. I’m pretty sure even I could get over that stupid crosshatch and I haven’t had a decade of Space Army training like Jan has.

STOP SHOWING OFF, LIQUID!



Okay, so the reason I’ve crushed Analysis and Gameplay into a single topic for this update is because there isn’t that much new gameplay elements involved here in Chapter 5, and the DLC also weaves in important plot updates into the gameplay section a little more than the previous chapters did.

Again, for reasons I still don’t quite get, Luger is swapped out as our Mission Control character for the DLC with Evelyn, at least from a practicality standpoint. From a storytelling standpoint, of course it makes sense. The whole point of Chapter 5 is to set up Killzone 2, where Evelyn is a fairly major character, so Guerrilla would naturally want to spend as much time familiarizing you with her character here as they possibly could.



After that little fake out at the beginning of the level, we get our third and final drivable vehicle in Killzone: Liberation, the ISA Jeep. And after the Hovertank and the Hovercraft, a good old fashioned dune buggy is a surprisingly down to earth change of pace for the DLC. We’ll be encountering a souped up version of the Jeep later on in Killzone 3 called the HAMR (“hammer”) IFV, a cousin of the LANCER IFV glimpsed occasionally in Killzone 1.

The Jeep controls identically to the tank and hovercraft, and once again in co-op mode control is split between the two players acting as a driver and a gunner, respectively. The Jeep is the figurative mid-point between the tank and hovercraft, it’s faster and more maneuverable than the tank, yet is also less inclined to drifting and over steering like the hovercraft.

It also has slightly more armour than the hovercraft.

Up in the top right corner of the screenshot you can also see something that’s kind of popped up the background of the last few stages but gets a more prominent role here in this run to the next portion of the ISA base: Helghast auto-turrets. These automated machine guns line the path you need to drive down and can whittle away the Jeep’s armor fairly quickly if you dawdle in their line of fire for too long.

Taking the ones on the ridge of the canyons out is suicide. You’re better off just blowing past them and only taking out the ones in the upcoming boss arena where you have to fight a tank. Trust me, they’re not gonna chase after you.

During the Jeep section, Evelyn also namedrops General Mandrake, who was mentioned in the pre-level title card. He’s a slightly important figure, lore-wise at least, so let’s take a moment to talk about him then.



...For example, that’s him slumped up against the wall there in mid-frame, dying of several hundred Helghast-inflicted bullet wounds. Goddamn, the ISA have incredibly shit luck with keeping their generals either alive or loyal. I can see why Jan only accepts a promotion up to Colonel in Killzone 2, now. If he went any higher up the paygrade, he’d spend every other second nervously looking over his shoulder.

Anyway, Mandrake is the local commanding officer of Sedah City’s ISA detachment, and with his dying breaths we learn a few key details about the situation here.



Namely, that Rico was here with the Helghast, he might have at least helped kill Mandrake, and now they’ve all fled into the sewers from a nearby access shaft.

Oooo. Can I add another one to the counter?

• Dereliction of Duty
  
• Threatening a Superior Officer
  
• Assaulting a Superior Officer
  
• Providing Intelligence to the Enemy
  
• High Treason against the ISA
  
• Aiding and Abetting Enemies of the ISA
  
• Collaboration with Enemies of the ISA
  
• Participation in the Murder of a Superior Officer

Oh what a day. What a LOVELY day!

It should also be noted that Jan later names the strike fleet he leads to Helghan in Killzone 2 after General Mandrake. Following the abysmal failure of Admiral Alex Grey’s first wave assault on Helghan, Templar’s Battle Group Mandrake arrives a few weeks later to continue the fight utilizing new tactics gleaned from her fleet’s initial difficulties.

Unfortunately, there’s no Battle Group Vaughton in memory of old General Bradley “Toothless Brad” Vaughton from Killzone 1. And also, it would just seem really gauche to name a fleet Battle Group Adams, given, well… everything we know about Stuart Adams.


Also, one interesting cultural gloss regarding Mandrake's namesake, the Mandragora plant: the Mandragora officinarum is a rather famous root in literary, religious, and occult circles, notable for its distinctive shape like a small human body. It's often used as an ingredient in magic spells and is often liked to a homumculus, a small human-like creature with its roots in the world of alchemy. But beyond that, the Mandrake or Mandragora is also famous for being a hallucinogen and an alleged aphrodisiac.

Funny then, how a group of unsubtly phallic starships is named for a root thought in ancient times to increase male potency, no?

Just sayin'...



So Jan and Hakha runs off towards the sewers, still not wanting to believe that Rico could have any part in whatever the Helghast have been up to here.





Uh oh…



Well. Shit. It’s Rico and a group of Helghast bodyguards. Ummmm… Yeah, that’s some pretty damning evidence right there. I think Rico’s pretty much facing a death sentence the second Templar gets his hands on him, assuming he just doesn’t haul off and summarily execute him right here.



Well, now that the cat’s out of the bag and Rico’s up-till-now rumored collaboration with the Helghast has been confirmed, the Helgoons open fire on Templar to give Rico a chance to slip away into the sewers.



Templar manages to take one of them out, but hangs back behind cover while the other two climb in after Rico.





I don’t know, but I’m guessing the explanation has to be fucking a-maz-ing.



STAGE 2: DEFECTION

But WHOSE?!!! DUNDUNDUUUUUUUUN!!!!

So Stage 2 is a sewer level. A big honkin’, shitty sewer level. Paging Dash Rendar…



Umm… She’s a nuclear munitions expert, Jan. What, do you think that just because she has the title “Dr.” in front of her name that means she knows everything? Yeah, just hang on a second there Jan as she dials up someone from Sedah City Public Works.



Or she can just use her Star Trek scanners on the place AND prove she’s an Omidisciplanary Scientist while she’s at it. Either that, or she is a Gaius Baltar-level bullshit artist when it comes to “talking authoritatively about things outside of your field of study”.



Oh Jan…



We learn early on in the level that not only are they way more Helghast down here than there reasonably should be this far into essentially a post-war clean-up effort now, but that they’ve been using the sewers to launch attacks inside Sedah City itself.





The sewers share a lot of similarities to the refinery and dockyard from Chapter 2, namely open level that’s fairly easy to get lost in where you have to shut off various hazards like these outblowing water pipes before you can advance forward.

Trying to run through the water will cause you to slip and fall and stun yourself for a few seconds, like what happens to both of us in the video.



The main objective for this first part of the stage is to get this floodgate open. There are two switches to unlock it, and they’re obtusely on opposite ends of the stage.

Cue: “Sally and crow get lost for half an hour trying to figure out how to get the damn thing open.”



Midway through the level, Evelyn drops a few more hints as to the identity of the ISA traitor who’s been lurking in the shadows since Metrac and Cobar’s little walk and talk introduction at the seaport.



So Evelyn’s gonna get on the case of figuring out and exposing our mole as Templar and Haka wades through some more knee-high liquefied feces.



Oh, this is the map screen for Killzone: Liberation, by the way. Yes. We got so lost that I OPENED THE MAP SCREEN FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE ENTIRE PLAYTHROUGH!

Pressing the Select button brings up the map. The grey areas on screen are walkable terrain, black areas are impassable, and the various shades denote terrain elevation. You can also see where you are, your co-op partner is, and where any crates, keycards, open power up items, and level exit points are. The thumbstick scrolls around the map while the L and R shoulder buttons zoom the map in and out. Pressing the Square button will bring up an icon legend telling you what icons represent what objects.

On the left side of the screen are your mission objectives. Completed objectives are denoted by a bright orange square in front of them. Active objectives, such as “Trace Rico” have a black square in front of them.

And lastly, up at the top right of the map screen you can see your total Vektan Dollars collected for your current stage.



Eat shit and die, Helgoons!



We also take a brief detour into the Sector 7 Train Graveyard from Final Fantasy VII. I know Evelyn said at the start of the stage that there was a subway terminus and an emergency evacuation line down here. I just don’t know why it has to pass directly through a sewer system.

Maybe that’s just how trains run in the future. I dunno.



Once the floodgates open, Evelyn informs us she’s found Rico… and a few of the missing Red Dust bombs, by the look of it.



At the end of the stage, Jan finally happens upon Rico.



He readies his courage, and prepares to face the hardest confrontation of his life.





Something tells me that Jan was the last person Rico was expecting to run into down here in the sewers.



That said, he seems to be at ease with him finding him, despite the cloud of suspicion that’s been hoving over him for quite a while now, lowering his weapon in Jan’s presence. Of course, it doesn’t seem to click that the weapon he’s lowering is a Helghast StA-52 Assault Rife—a gun he has no business holding unless he really is a Helghast traitor… or this is Killzone 1 and he’s run out of special ammo for his M224-A3.



Jan, predictably, is a very angry to see Rico so blithely nonchalant after participating in the apparent murder of General Mandrake, and probably holding the Helghast rifle that did the deed.



And because Rico’s a thick idiot, he’s kind of shocked that Templar is attacking him all of the sudden.



So he fights back by… Olympic Slam’ming him into the concrete.

Oh PSP Cutscenes. I’m sad we’re coming to the end of you in the next update.



However, Templar is able to apparently survive getting his neck broken and skull fractured on a concrete floor and manages to get Rico off his feet.



Oh the trouble you would save so many souls if you just did Jan.

Come on. Do it.

No one’s watching.

It’ll be our little secret.



To quote JamieTheD: DRAMA-BOMB!



In short order, Rico reveals all the background details that have been informing the goings on of Liberation, yet have been just out of Jan’s knowledge till now. So we have here the missing cache of weapons from the Rayhoven base, which as it turns out Stratson, our second ISA traitor general, allowed the Helghast to steal when they overran the base.

Stratson sending Templar and Hakha to destroy the access elevator and “seal” the weapons bunker was actually his way of covering up the evidence that the cache had already been looted by the Helghast.



And here at long last, the sub-title of this LP is contextualized. We called Liberation “The Merry Wives Generals of Vekta” because of its central plot of two generals, Metrac and Stratson, coming together and colluding with one another to hoodwink a third party, namely all of Vekta. The name of course is an allusion to Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, wherein Sir John Falstaff’s ploy to swindle a pair of lords is undone when said lords' wives collude together to humiliate him and a good time was had by all.

Wives has an infamous reputation among Shakespearean scholars, as the play is The Bard's first and only “spin-off,” so to speak. The character of Sir John Falstaff (alleged to have been based off of Sir John Oldcastle) originally appeared in the dramas Henry IV, Part I and Henry IV, Part II as a comic relief character, con artist, and hanger-on to Prince Hal, the future King Henry V of England. And though both parts of Henry IV are kind of the duller portions of the so-called Plantagenet Tetralogy, the character audiences fell in love with was Falstaff, to the point where Shakespeare was repeatedly lobbied by fans to write more stories about him. Only one of these ever came to fruition; The Merry Wives of Windsor.

And just as well, too, because it’s kind of universally despised by critics and scholars and derided as a slapdash, hastily written, cashgrab of questionable quality. So if nothing else, it at least shows that even William Shakespeare of all people wasn’t immune from making his own Hot Tub Time Machine 2.

Blind Sally also has this to say about The Merry Wives:





Anyway, Rico, in typical Rico fashion glosses over the finer details of Metrac and Stratson’s plot, so I’ll explain it in a little more depth right here.

At some point during Chapters 1-3, Stratson approached Rico and essentially pressganged him into a covert mission to infiltrate Metrac’s camp as a feigned turncoat. When he runs off to get medical supplies for that dropship pilot in Chapter 3 and gets captured by Cobar, that was actually him turning himself in to Metrac.

Rico believed he was infiltrating Metrac’s inner circle to gather intelligence on the Helghast’s operations and help win the war and recover the Rayhoven weapons. Rico goes along with the plan under the impression that Stratson informed Templar about his status after he was in Metrac’s custody. Hence why Rico was shocked that Templar attacked him just now.

What Rico didn’t account for is that Stratson was actually a traitor himself working with Metrac, and that Stratson had betrayed him the second he sent him to Metrac. Stratson’s plan was to publicly expose Rico’s supposedly covert mission and paint HIM as the traitor who sold out Southern Vekta to the Helghast in order to cover up his own involvement in the plot.

The one thing he didn’t account for was Templar actually fighting his way through the Helghast forces that Rico was operating with and actually taking him alive so he’d talk.



So now we know why Stratson’s subordinates and contemporaries in ISA command have been dropping like flies in recent weeks: he’s been feeding the Helghast info on their movements so they can take them out one by one to leave him in absolute control over the ISA military in the south.

We also learn that while Rico was present at the ISA base when Mandrake was killed, he was not a part of the actual murder, so we can scratch a whole list of accused offenses off the War Crimes counter.



However, just as Rico seems to be getting to the good stuff, the lift him and Templar find themselves on begins to rise to the surface.



Ummm…



Yeah, Jan, I don’t think it’s a good idea to give Rico a gun. Just given his present mindframe and recent history.

You know.



And as we round out Stage 2, Jan shows that after all this he still has faith in Rico. All told, it’s probably the only thing keeping him straight and sane right now. Everything and everyone else might have betrayed and abandoned Rico, but not Jan. Jan will always have faith in Rico, for better or worse, and while Rico will become incredibly jaded with the ISA’s command structure after damn-near having his career ruined by a tarnished member of the ISA brass, at least his friend Jan will never betray or abandon him.

As long as he still has Jan, Rico will still be human.




ISA Jeep

Also referred to as the ISA Buggy, this light rapid all-terrain vehicle is used for operations where rapid action is required, particularly fast hit-and-fade or reconnaissance operations. With a set of tires and suspension that can handle the most difficult of terrain, the ISA Jeep can seat up to three people, a driver, a passanger, and a gunner, and is armed with a single turret-mounted M221-A1 large machine gun for offense and defensive purposes.

Though it is capable of traveling at high speeds under control, its light armor limits the amount of enemy fire it can withstand before failing.



More big revelations as we head into the finale of Killzone: Liberation.



Rico has revealed his role as an unwitting pawn in Metrac and Stratson’s ploy to cripple Vekta for the Helghast. Though he’s been cleared of all suspicions in the eyes of Templar, to the Vektan public and the surviving ISA brass, he’s still seen as a traitor, and only a public confession from Stratson will be enough to spare him from the firing squad now.



Dwight Stratson has been revealed as the true power behind Metrac’s until now perplexingly precise blitzkrieg of Southern Vekta, the “root” of evil, if you will. With Heff Milcher and General Mandrake dead, and Admiral Grey incapacitated, Stratson’s purge of the ISA command structure is nearly complete. All the stands between him and total domination of Vekta’s military is General Murphy stationed in Sedah City itself.

…Guess he’s not getting a “Battle Group Stratson” named after him now, is he?



SNAAAAAAAAAKE!!! It's not over yet!



HOW TO INSTALL THE CHAPTER 5 DLC FOR KILLZONE: LIBERATION

If you have a copy of Killzone: Liberation (seriously, track one down, it's a pretty decent game all told), and would like to have the Chapter 5 DLC for yourself to see the complete Killzone: Liberation story, then this segment here will show you where to get it and how to go about installing it on your PSP.

For starters, the Chapter 5 DLC can be downloaded from this page here on Guerrilla's Killzone website. The visuals of the site have been updated to reflect the most recent mainline game in the series, Killzone: Shadow Fall, but all the links for Liberation still work.

If you just want to skip right to the file, the direct download links are right here:

• NTSC-U/C Version
  
• PAL Version

And here are Guerrilla's official instructions on how to go about installing it on your PSP once you have it on you computer:


Also of note: Guerrilla also uploaded a ZIP file including all the Killzone: Liberation unlockable materials that would have been auto-downloaded from the PlayStation Network when the game detected certain check flags. This content was pulled from the PSN after Sony wrote the PSP off once and for all in favour of the Vita, but Guerrilla has graciously hosted it on their website for free now.

It includes awesome stuff like Killzone: Liberation PSP and PC wallpapers, concept art, making of video, and even some sick ass ISA and Helghast propaganda one-sheets. I'll be going back and adding various pieces to their appropriate updates and will do a massive dump of everything in a separate post once the storyline of Liberation is finished for good.G